Camera, Tank and Keyboards

A new camera that you can focus later, Skype can connect your username to your IP address, new infrared camouflage system for tanks, seeing through walls with cool tech, and lots of calls from listeners. Assistive typing with devorak vs qwerty keyboards or use a camera-microphone-pen and more. Al is back with a Crazy USB and Ben and Lyle are there too.

The ability to see through walls is no longer the stuff of science fiction, thanks to new radar technology developed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.

Much as humans and other animals see via waves of visible light that bounce off objects and then strike our eyes’ retinas, radar “sees” by sending out radio waves that bounce off targets and return to the radar’s receivers. But just as light can’t pass through solid objects in quantities large enough for the eye to detect, it’s hard to build radar that can penetrate walls well enough to show what’s happening behind. Now, Lincoln Lab researchers have built a system that can see through walls from some distance away, giving an instantaneous picture of the activity on the other side.

The study focused on how a Skype user’s IP address can be determined without that user knowing, and then linking that same IP address to files that are being shared through peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent.

Using information that users publish in Skype’s directory, such as their name, location and birth date, the researchers were able to get very close to identifying the person doing the sharing. They note, however, the method will just identify a machine rather than an actual person behind the computer.

A Mountain View start-up is promising that its camera, due later this year, will bring the biggest change to photography since the transition from film to digital.
Ordinarily, I’m turned off by such hyperbole, but after having seen a demo from Lytro, that statement seems downright reasonable.
The breakthrough is a different type of sensor that captures what are known as light fields — basically, all the light that is moving in all directions in the view of the camera. That offers several advantages over traditional photography, the most revolutionary of which is that photos no longer need to be focused before they are taken.

You shred sensitive documents for security but what do you do with CDs and DVDs that contain sensitive data?
It’s dangerous to break them but you can’t just throw them away. USB Powered CD/DVD Destroyer is the answer.
It is an ideal product for destroying data stored on CDs and DVDs, with three carbon steel knurled points, USB Powered CD/DVD Destroyer permanently destroys the surface of CDs, DVDs and other CD-size disks rendering the data-bearing surfaces unreadable within 5 seconds.
Your sensitive data cannot be read and you don’t have to break disks.

Taking notes in class and recording audio matching up to what you are writing. You need patterned paper, but by tapping the things you wrote earlier you can replay what was recorded when you wrote it. Audio matched to your notes – way cool